“... children and teenagers. Didion points out inanities: subsidies that support the acreage of rice and cotton, both of which need extravagant amounts of water but have only a small market. Yes, that’s dumb, and even crooked. But Didion stops short – as she must – of that old nightmare that Californians are wasting the last drops of water by keeping ...”

“... somewhat less at ease with texts, Professor Goffen is at her best when, following the example of David Rosand, she discusses the relation of the paintings to their physical context in the Frari, emphasising what it might be convenient to call their ‘intermonumentality’: in other words, the way in which they echo, quote or refer to other images in the ...”

“... gestures, glazed irony and so on. But for Moody (b.1961), as for Jonathan Franzen (b.1959) and David Foster Wallace (b.1962), the previous generation’s experimentalism was as much a way of looking at society as a renovation of novelistic technique. Writers their grouchier teachers viewed as rebarbatively modish or futuristic struck them as fairly ...”

“... himself no longer. I was in Downing Street with the prime minister’s foreign affairs adviser, David Manning; the overcoated figure bursting into our meeting was Jack Straw. He wanted to tell Manning that he had persuaded Joschka Fischer, the German foreign minister, to add Hamas to the EU list of terrorist movements. His tale of his conversion of Fischer ...”

“... She had also yelled out ‘Afghanistan’, a word hardly anyone else would say, not Condoleezza Rice, not Paul Ryan, not Romney himself. On Tuesday night I stood with five Occupiers on Ashley Drive. They were holding ‘Mr 1%’ signs and shouting at the delegates: ‘Don’t look at me, you might catch poverty.’ ...”

“... to play fifty years ago) were also billed, alongside veterans from the founding festival: Santana, David Crosby, Country Joe McDonald, the remains of the Grateful Dead, Canned Heat and others. But Lang’s fifty-up began to unravel when his top-dog investor, the Japanese digicoms company Dentsu Aegis, announced from its London HQ that it was pulling ...”

“... of Cleopatra a male failing, she mistakenly turns the ‘Hellenistic historian’ E.E. (Ellen) Rice into a man. Wyke picks up the story of Cleopatra’s image in the 20th century with the fascinating story of the Italian Marcantonio e Cleopatra of 1910, Fox Film’s 1917 Cleopatra, starring Theodosia Goodman under the name ‘Theda ...”

“... Napoleon, a Spanish dancer, Donald Duck and several other Disney characters, as well as a grain of rice inscribed with verse. The show was reviewed on the front page of the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. The following year he received a prize from the National Small Works Competition, judged by a curator from the Guggenheim Museum.In December 1990 ...”

“... in the dry lands and to allow the endless arid-land agriculture to produce iceberg lettuces and rice and alfalfa and cotton fields, though in some of those places there is hardly enough rainfall to raise an agave plant. The water is heavily subsidised so that farmers – mostly large-scale agribusiness enterprises, not Jeffersonian yeomen – can also ...”

“... dicta gathered together in the Yale Book does bring to mind a quotation from the only song by David Byrne for which it finds space: ‘You may ask yourself/Well, how did I get here?’How did we get here? What can the history of books of quotations tell us about what they’re now expected to contain? As everybody knows, ‘there is no new thing under the ...”

“... Unicef, concerned about the sensitivity of children to odd flavours, commissioned a study in which rice was prepared with salt iodised at ten times the maximum recommended concentration. In double-blind taste tests, the iodine was undetectable.)In 1915, Hunziker’s speech was published as a 24-page booklet. It was brief and beguilingly simple, but in ...”

“... Her appearances were always lively. Wearing black leather and stilettos, she flirted with David Letterman, telling him that the ‘important lesson’ she learned from her father is ‘balls’: ‘I somehow grew them somewhere along the line.’ Conan O’Brien was a bit shrill for her taste, shrieking about portraits painted in blood and the time ...”

“... or ‘patience’. The outbreak of the second intifada, in response to failed peace talks at Camp David in 2000 and Ariel Sharon’s provocative visit to Temple Mount, wrong-footed Hamas. The leadership reacted by ramping up suicide bombings, but it was being led by events rather than leading them. The movement had been founded on a rejection of partition and ...”

“... of the same Eighties vintage: Atari and Nintendo video games, Airfix models, Tintin and Asterix, David Attenborough’s Life on Earth, Warner Brothers cartoons, The Waltons and The A-Team, the film Zombie Flesh-Eaters. The novel begins in Bangkok’s backpackers’ quarter, the Khao San Road, ‘a decompression chamber for those about to leave or enter ...”

“... Billy finds that the young son of his adopted family has died. People riot in the streets for rice. He feels that Sukarno, who has been like a god to him, is betraying his country. He stages a protest during a huge party: hangs a sign reading, ‘Sukarno, feed your people,’ from a high window, and falls or jumps as the security police break into the ...”